Obama is expected to move swiftly to reverse executive orders regarding torture of terror suspects, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and other controversial security policies, sources close to his transition said, in dramatic gestures aimed at reversing President Bush’s accumulation of executive power.

44 to reverse 43's executive orders

President-elect Barack Obama is expected to move swiftly to reverse executive orders regarding torture of terror suspects, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and other controversial security policies, sources close to his transition said, in dramatic gestures aimed at reversing President Bush’s accumulation of executive power.

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) said he’s been informed that President Obama will support his proposed legislation to make public some opinions from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which issued some of the Bush Administration's most sweeping claims of executive power. Obama also has promised to limit President Bush's practice of using "signing statements" to amend legislation.

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"Every day we get indications that they're serious about reversing the abuses of the Constitution," Feingold, a harsh Bush critic, told Politico. Feingold said he thinks Obama is likely to issue executive orders rapidly reversing Bush policies, and others have indicate that those will likely cover the interrogation and detention of terror suspects, and keeping the records of past presidents secret.

"I don't know in what order or how fast" Obama’s executive orders could come, he said. "It'll be important that a couple of them be done immediately, and I think they will be, to show there's a strong break from the current policy."

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Chris Lu, executive director of Obama’s transition team, told supporters in a conference call earlier this month that Obama’s aides have “started developing executive orders that the pres elect is considering –not only ones the President-elect will sign after January 20, but also ones we will want to repeal."

Obama aides didn't respond to requests for more detail, but the president-elect campaigned against what he called Bush’s abuse of executive authority.

"I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution," Obama told an audience at a campaign fundraiser in 2007.

In “Change for America,” a book by the Center for American Progress Action Fund that was designed as a blueprint for Obama’s presidency, Yale Law School dean Harold Hongju Koh outlined "a package of executive orders, proposed legislation, agency shakeups, and concrete foreign policy actions” the new president should embrace, including “four key executive orders” requiring the closing of Guantanamo Bay and ending the torture of detainees.

The Associated Press reported Monday that transition advisers said Obama could sign an executive order in his first week ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay, although shuttering the prison and transferring the prisoners somewhere else would take time.

On Sunday, Obama promised to close the military prison, but cautioned that it may not happen as quickly as civil rights advocates would like.

"I think it’s going to take some time, and our legal teams are working in consultation with our national security apparatus as we speak to help design exactly what we need to do," Obama said on ABC’s ‘This Week’. "But I don’t want to be ambiguous about this. We are going to close Guantanamo, and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our Constitution."

Responding to a 2007 questionnaire from the Boston Globe, Obama said repeatedly that the president doesn't have the power to disregard Congress in matters of war and national security. But he was vague on the question of executive privilege — his right to keep documents and testimony about White House decisions from Congress.

Obama also defended a president’s right to use signing statements to clarify law, but he criticized Bush’s “clear abuse of this prerogative” to undermine laws he didn’t like.

"He is definitely going to handle signing statements in a very different fashion than Bush," said Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "He'll issue some, no doubt, but he'll do it on a limited basis, and in a much more constrained way - he won't be saying, 'I refuse to execute this portion of the law,' for example."